Installation last week attended a ceremony held by Crestron to mark the opening its new state-of-the-art customer experience centre in Ulm, Germany. It was officially opened by the Mayor of Ulm, Ivo Gönner (centre of picture, with moustache); Crestron Electronics CEO Randy Klein and Crestron International CEO Robin van Meeuwen spoke at the ceremony.
Ulm, which lies between Stuttgart and Munich in the south of Germany, is the location of the first of five Crestron office locations to open in the country – the others are in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Duisburg and Berlin. The Ulm facility has relocated, enabling Crestron to design and install its own infrastructure there from scratch.
“The German AV market is spread out through the whole country,” commented Siegfried Hermann, sales manager, Germany, speaking to us before the ceremony. “We cannot concentrate our efforts around just one city.
“Here we are one hour to Munich, one hour to Stuttgart. The main car industry and metalworking industry is in the south.”
The new centre has been designed to showcase Crestron’s latest corporate and residential technologies – providing its dealer community with extensive facilities to demonstrate solutions to prospective customers. The centre comes complete with a large hospitality area and will be free of charge for Crestron dealers to use.
Hermann told us that Crestron’s German market is approximately 80% commercial, 20% residential. “We are strong in the commercial market, but we have to improve in the residential market.” Strong competition from KNX, which is well established in Germany, is a factor here, he added.
The centre also features a purpose-built ‘Meeting room of the future’ which includes the latest RL2 solution – a complete group collaboration solution that combines Crestron hardware with Microsoft Lync 2013 software.
